Robert Morgan | V E R S E and I M A G E

Posts Tagged ‘Robert Morgan’

Layers

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Press 53, Robert Morgan, Southern writing on February 7, 2025| 4 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Robert Morgan]

Flight of the Mountains

Steep shoals

pyramid in the west,

high groves and

sacred

burial ranges

piled like thunderheads,

flap one on the

other to

high haze,

ladder up to the

dam holding back sky.

The great wings

back

each other

up all the way

to the final gap.

Clear weather

files the nick

sharp as

a gunsight.

I mean to climb

up there,

over the hogbacks and

heavy buttresses,

knowing hollows

and marshes

of meander

separate the

rough topologies to

sit at the tip

of the breaking

looking over.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

And those walls rest / like successive stages of etymology / on foundations and / castellations of temple-brothels / over cellar libraries. +++++ Tell

I’m six and we’re driving from our home in Memphis to visit Grandmother and Granddaddy in Hamlet, North Carolina. Pre I-40, two long days on blacktop. The car games I can play with my little brother have already gone flat: Cow Checkers, 10 points for a white horse, 100 points for a white mule. Now Mom is entertaining me with the Alphabet game. We have to spot items along the two-lane that start with each letter in sequence.

Airplane, Barn, lady wearing a Coat . . . now I’m stuck on M. We’re still driving through the low rolling hills of western Tennessee, its antediluvian coastal plane, and Mom guides me to look out the front windshield. “How far do you think you can see?” I can’t even guess. “That’s a mile, Billy. You can see at least a Mile.”

I am astonished. Up until that very moment a Mile was an abstract concept equivalent to a very, very, long way. Much too far to walk, impossible that it could actually be a tangible thing, and here I was seeing one! This was also around the time in my life when I realized that I could not NOT read the billboards and road signs. I could no longer unsee the words all around me that suddenly meant. Words were warping my consciousness. Words surrounded me, more real than the objects they represent.

Stratigraphy, the study of layers, is the deep domicile of archaeologists and geologists. Etymology is the archaeology of words, their first seeds, their roots and stems; etymology is the geology of language. How have the million intersections of grunts and grammar, symbology and syntax come to map and define our thinking? How can a handful of inchoate squiggles clustered into three or four recognizable tropes bring us to tears or make us fighting mad? And why do we persist in arranging them and rearranging them in desperate hope of creating something truly new?

Logos – In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I will keep reading my glossaries and dictionaries. Footers and pilings of words will rise to gables and mansards and shelter me. Layer upon layer I will walk the strata of explication and illumination and poetry. Look, there ahead, a bright light – it can’t be more than a Mile!

❦ ❦ ❦

Tell

Coming on a hill many stories

above the grasslands

and wastes of far-reaching canals.

Rain and high wind have exposed

bits of pottery and brick

around the summit.

A wall corner shows. Digging,

fortresses filled with blowing

dirt raise battlements

built on the ruins of others

ancient to them.

And those walls rest

like successive stages of

etymology on the foundations and

castellations of temple-brothels

over cellar libraries.

Peeling off a few more centuries finds

a mausoleum unsealed and robbed

before the body melted.

Shoveling through silt, lamina

of urns, weapons, after

a few thousand years to arrive

beyond assembling and restoration

at virgin soil, without clue,

no origin. There at the center

of the first hill just

sandstorms leveling and filling

all depressions, building ramps

up and over walls, and below that

nothing but mud where once

some river anointing

the steppes turned back to the sea,

and dust saying anathema.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

. . . You are one gene / in the cells of the body of language. +++

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ from Mockingbird

The fourth book in Robert Morgan’s Collected Early Poems is Trunk & Thicket. It begins with him opening an ancient trunk in the dusty attic of his grandparents’ home, breaking the rustmolten lock to delve its layers of artifacts and treasures and paper in a drymelt. The long poem, 25 pages, goes on to climb the trunk of his family tree, fall more than once between the branches, and thrash through tangled thickets of every memory and relic and Uncle that have folded and switched him into his own personal landscape. The tale follows no clear trodden footpath but is a bushwhacking through the clutch of briars to find one and then another sacred landmark.

And the words, the words! The language of mountains and one-room churches and generations stretching beyond sight in the blue mist of ridges sits down at a rough trestle table with galaxies and particles and the fierce tokamak of the overhead sun. Some of these words were already chafed and well-worn when they clambered from the barque on the Carolina coast; some bite our tongues with the sharp teeth of ions and new-minted fire. Especially in the final long poem, Mockingbird, Robert Morgan calls together a congregation of words that shout as language receives a powerful new baptism. Proverbs and parables. Exhortation and invitation.

Exalted and utterly common. Words are the leafmould that almost conceal heartleaves of wild ginger in February. Words are the green plant that thrives unseen in this cold atmosphere, that will not discourage a closer look. Words are the purple stems parting and recumbent buds opening. Despair, if you will, that there is no light left in the world, but then nevertheless kneel and touch and discover, before Spring is even a rustling gestation in your belly, that the words of earth are making flowers.

❦

The Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, available HERE from Press 53, reprints in their entirety his first four published volumes: Zirconia Poems (1969); Red Owl (1972); Land Diving (1976); Trunk & Thicket (1978).

Read additional selections from this new book at last week’s VERSE & IMAGE.

❦ ❦ ❦

Mockingbird

[excerpt – introduction]

While the bee sleeps in the southern night

and weeds weigh under dowries of dew,

above the distant honky-tonk of falls in

the July dark, before the katydids, when

the only frost is lunar, a voice that

raises the hackles on mountains and chills

the barometric spine, that radios through

many channels in the crab orchard and from

maples above the road. What madrigalist

watering the night with polyphony?

You could see orchestras and oratorios

in the polyglot dark, not so much a

mocking of the many-voiced populations

as a gathering to unlikely congregation

of all song, an anthology including

rooster and cricket broadcast from an ounce

of hot flesh through its briar tongue and filling

the hollows and thickets and dry ditches of

the river valley, and soaking under eaves

to the inner ear’s accelerator,

circling quick into sleep and bombarding

the ledges of dream.

+++++++++++++ It is my time then;

I surface like a drowned man after three

days and lie trembling with attention to

the heart’s perpetual bass. The dark belongs

to me, the peak of alert night. Mama said,

Then is the time to think about God and

feel close to him. But I float in a

sentient medium that amplifies the

distant creek rubbing its rocks, and mist

muddying the weeds by the dusty road,

and I hear the big distance between stars

where two almost light in the oak by the

window. The ascending particle

contraltos. The river’s a great liquid

bird singing all day between boulders,

over logs and around bushy islands.

Empties through the gorge its burden without

lessening. All night sings under westering

stars, loudest in the dark before day.

++++++++++ And then –

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

. .

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Just Human

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Press 53, Robert Morgan, Southern writing on January 31, 2025| 9 Comments »

[with 4 poems by Robert Morgan]

Time

Snow-covered peaks gather in the north

like arabs talking.

You can’t be sure you see them

but they leave an afterimage, detached

from the horizon, floating on haze.

Rugged seconds around the sky’s dial.

If you look long enough they seem to march

like bishops shuffling toward hell.

I know the ground is a bridge

leading there –

to the white tents

and altitudes of death –

but I don’t believe it. I don’t

believe you can get there by just walking

the earth one step after another,

but must be snatched miraculously away,

fall upward into the terrible

blue emptiness.

When I stand in a field,

the field and I are a sundial.

But the body alone is a clock, and each

motion it makes.

Something must distract us, anything.

The cornfield slapping in the rhythm of a tennis game,

a crow flying his clockhands on a face

without surface.

The will always hungry.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

Two squirrels in my beech tree just can’t get along. I’ve named them Buddy and Holly. Buddy attacks my squirrel-proof feeder like he’s going to buzzsaw right through the metal bars. Meanwhile Holly is perched on a high branch eating beechnuts like popcorn and raining the pointy tetrahedrons on my deck, little caltrops.

Until I arrive to refill the feeder. Then Buddy has to scoot; he takes a flying leap into the silverbell. Holly continues to observe. I always spill some seeds – careless me – and when I re-hang the feeder Buddy scrabbles back to snarf a few then spring back up to the squirrel-proof, legs spread and clawed toes splayed like a cheetah bringing down a gazelle. At this point Holly climbs down to check out Buddy’s leavings. When he spies her, things get tense.

“Hey! Those are my seeds. Those are all my seeds!”

Holly sits up on her little haunches and rolls her eyes. “I didn’t see you planting any sunflowers last summer, Bottlebrush. You just play with your feeder toy while I have a nice lunch.”

“But I want those seeds. You might eat something I’m going to need later. Quit being so mean! Don’t you know this is where bad feelings come from?”

“Listen, Furbrain, this is where bad feelings come from.” She pokes his fuzzy chest with a foreclaw. “If you’re having bad feelings, I didn’t give them to you. You gave them to yourself.”

“Selfish, selfish, selfish.”

“Can I help it if it’s in my squirrel-nature to be hungry? And isn’t it squirrel-nature when you’re hungry to eat? Why don’t you pull up a chair (speaking entirely figuratively, of course) and enjoy a little lunch yourself.”

“Hmph, sez you,” Buddy grumbles. He picks up a seed and nibbles. Palpable silence I think you could call it.

“Hey,” Buddy finally offers after a few minutes, “When we finish these seeds, how about you hop up on that feeder with me. Maybe together we can shake out a few seeds. And . . . you could have some, too, if you want.”

❦

Years ago Linda and I watched an episode of X-Files that has become our byword. Scully and Mulder were at a rest home investigating paranormal events involving gruesome mutilation, the usual stuff. One of the rest home residents was assisting them with their inquiries. Should he also be a suspect? The old man was wincingly meek, not very bright, and whenever he messed up or something went wrong he would hang his head and apologize, “I’m just a human being.”

I am just a human being. And how often am I compelled to admit that I inhabit a planet full of people that are also just human beings? How did Linda and I end up with so many family members who seem incapable of living up to our expectations? Oh well, they are just human beings. And so are the people we attend church with, and sing with, and meet at the store, and whose yard signs and bumper sticks are so aggressively in our faces. “What a world,” said the Wicked Witch of the West when she was doused. So many of these human beings have the power to give me endless heartburn; I could use some of that cold water.

Or I could quit giving them so much power. I’m lucky that I have Holly to remind me – when there are flickers of bad feelings, maybe some human being has struck the spark but I provide the fuel. Let’s just cool down for a minute. Aren’t we in this thing together? I’ll try to cut you the same slack I’d want you to cut me. After all, the two of us are just human beings.

❦ ❦ ❦

Land Diving

Though it’s no disgrace refusing

some things must be done.

And present accomplishment

is no guarantee

of future.

You must come close

as possible without touching

to prove brinksmanship, fly

from the sapling girdered tower

before the whole village, leaping with a scream

against the wall of fear, step onto

the white-hot floor

of emptiness

holding only to yourself.

You will know the pure isolation of fall.

The vines bound to your feet must not snag

on the scaffolding

or they will swing you crushing

into the frame and braces.

They must not break

or be an inch too long

or you will be smothered by

the swat of earth.

Yet the meaning is the closeness.

No stretching out your arms;

you must be jerked to a stop face against

the trampled dirt

by the carefully measured

bonds.

Only they can save you.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

In a journal he kept in the 1970’s, The Transfigured Body, Robert Morgan wrote this: “It is objectivity and precision that can be translated and that translates, the love of the humble detail, a sensitivity to the eros of all things, focused recognition; . . . I write to establish the reality of things. It’s as if I’m afraid they aren’t there unless substantiated by language, and consubstantiated.” [from the introduction by Robert M. West to Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan]

Consubstantiation is a new word for me. I recognize transubstantiation, which means transmutation, to utterly change the character or substance of a thing. But consubstantiation is more personal, more intimate – to exist together in one and the same time and space. To unite and blend and merge. To become one. I yearn to be attuned to the smallest detail. I long to feel it, that shared presence with other humble creatures in the midst of creation, that eros of all things.

I prepare myself for that love by learning: botany, taxonomy, ecology. But I experience eros by kneeling and feeling the waxy winter leaf of a cranefly orchid; by turning its shadow green face to reveal the rich burgundy of its obverse; by remembering July blossoms when I see the dry seed stalk in January; by imagining the scant slant sunlight kissing that tough leaf to grant life for another summer’s blooms.

And I experience the eros of all things through a poet’s careful observation, through the power of language to create juxtaposition and connection. Robert Morgan’s poems are often set in the North Carolina mountains, but his poetry is about everything. Perhaps we, who are just human beings after all, cannot overcome our hominid urges to circle around our small fires and fear and demonize all outsiders. Perhaps we can’t regain our ancestors’ connections to the earth, its plants and its animals, its textures and its smells. Sometimes I imagine we are determined to extinguish every spark that makes us human. But then I spend a quiet hour with poems to are determined to rekindle those sparks.

❦

The Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, available HERE from Press 53reprints in their entirety his first four published volumes: Zirconia Poems (1969); Red Owl (1972); Land Diving (1976); Trunk & Thicket (1978).

Read additional selections from this new book at last week’s VERSE & IMAGE.

❦ ❦ ❦

Whippoorwill

The dead call at sundown from their places

on the mountain and down by the old mill.

They rise from the cellars of trees

and move up and down the valley

all night grazing like deer.

The call:

a rusty windmill creaks on the prairie.

Bats dipping and rising on ski jumps

are antennae

receiving and transmitting the code.

The whippoorwill interprets the news

from the dead, the unborn.

2 A.M.

A dog barks through the horn of a valley.

Low moon burning in a cedar.

The creek mutters like an old woman

who walks in her sleep among the trees

dreaming of the life after death

when she will lie down like the stream

and flow to the darkness.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

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Bookshelves

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Press 53, Robert Morgan, Southern writing on January 24, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 4 poems by Robert Morgan]

Foxfire

Bright lace on the darkness grows

heavy as the meat of lightning bugs

crushed on bark, rotting leaves.

Flakes of the moon stuck to spongy logs.

Seconds sprinkled from a luminous dial on bearskin.

Glow worms crawl all night in stump water

without moving. St. Elmo’s fire.

Foxfire swims like fish of the deepest troughs.

City lights seen from a bomber.

the eyes of dead wood stare like jack-o-lanterns

burning last year’s sun

after a wet spell.

Coals of unlife,

chilly owls.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

When I was a Junior in High School I was going steady with the daughter of our town’s elementary school librarian. If you think Linda’s house wasn’t filled to the rafters with books, you’ve got another think coming. When we were in college, still dating, I decided for Christmas I would build her bookshelves.

During Junior High all the seventh grade boys took Home Ec with the girls and all the girls took Wood Shop with the boys. I got an A in sock darning and jello salad; on my woodworking project, a sculpture of a fish in walnut, I got a B+. Seven years later I gathered pine planks and 1×2’s in our basement to devise the Christmas present. Measure twice, cut once? Not so much as I recall, although I do remember wood glue, finishing nails, Minwax stain and varnish. Steel wool between coats. Linda seemed to like her present. Enough to marry me a year later and move the shelves to our 3rd floor apartment on Duke Street in Durham.

That little book case was not fine cabinetry, but the shelves didn’t sag beneath Linda’s textbooks: history, art, religion, all the heaviest stuff. My design was basic, mostly a ladder, something we and the years might climb together, or maybe an altar where she could cherish and display her first and truest loves. It was good as I could make it, the only thing I knew to build.

What did I know of all we and the years would build? The propagating books we’d carry home to become our family? Children grow and leave and carry their children back to you for an afternoon, but books are always close at hand to read to grandchildren like we read them to the grandchildren’s parents. A child is here for but a moment but bright spines and colored pages rest and wait for their return.

My work was not to build a house, or a home, or even rooms, but simply room enough for something she would never finish loving. Every birthday, every holiday, another book; any old occasion is fit time to add to the welcome weight of pages. They fill the hours and our hearts – and I foresee there will never be quite enough shelves for all.

❦ ❦ ❦

Very Old Man

Hounds bay in his breath,

face a wilderness, eyes like frozen fountains.

He speaks from a foreign country, words drunk

with exhaustion, wornout

habits of the tongue.

His shoulders are small as a child’s.

Sits on the cold peak watching us climb,

or doesn’t bother.

Elegy

Guess I’ll light a rag out of here, he said

and blindness rose in his open eyes.

Tilted chessmen, tombstones graze on the hill,

drag shadows at the setting moon.

Eighty years go down

like a ship.

Robert Morgan

❦ ❦ ❦

Saturday, September 15, 2001: Robert Morgan has managed to travel to Southern Pines to read at Weymouth Center before the North Carolina Poetry Society. So healing, so encouraging to us fellow mortals; I remember his tone and demeanor more than I remember his words, but many of his words have never left me. Actually, his words have grown in me and flourished. Audubon’s Flute – I have to pull that one out and read it every Earth Day.

Audubon in the summer woods

by the afternoon river sips

his flute, his fingers swimming on

the silver as silver notes pour

by the afternoon river, sips

and fills the mosquito-note air

So many notes before and after that morning in Weymouth Woods, so many words. No wonder that when I learn that Press 53 has collected Robert Morgan’s first four books of poetry into a single volume, I hear the silver tones calling me. In the lyrical introduction to Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Robert M. West shares this quotation: Asked, ‘What is the highest praise that could be given to a poet’s work, southern or otherwise?’ Morgan responded, “ ‘You must read this.’ The greatest honor is to be read.”

And so we shall read and honor Robert Morgan. I am picking up his book every day for the next several weeks, and we will see where the music leads us.

❦

Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, with an introduction by Robert M. West (co-editor of Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work), is a Carolina Classics Edition from Press 53, available HERE.